ABSTRACT
Religion is among the most beautiful and most natural of all things; that religion which ‘sees God in clouds and hears him in the winds’, which endows every object of sense with a living soul, which finds in the system of nature, whatever is holy, mysterious and venerable, and inspires the bosom with sentiments of awe and veneration. But accursed and detestable is that religion by which the fancy is hag-rid, and conscience is excited to torment us with phantoms of guilt, which endows the priest with his pernicious empire over the mind, which undermines boldness of opinion and intrepidity of feeling, which aggravates a thousand-fold the inevitable calamity, death, and haunts us with the fiends and retributory punishments of a future world. 1
